Reading large amounts of text on a website could be not very comfortable. If you are designing, for example, a news website you have to take care about the screen size.

In order to make reading more enjoyable The New York Times, as well as other newspaper websites, use a fixed-width screen size. It doesn’t matter how big the browser window is, the site width stays the same:

If they were not using a fixed screen size users could make their browsers too big and the text lines would be too long to easily read them.

This web design and usability pattern help users read the information you are offering them, having as a result better chances of them finishing reading the text and staying longer in your website.